The rumors about the coming RV670 chip have been many, and sometimes not entirely matching. The latest set comes from VR-Zone which has come across quite a lot of information on the upcoming graphics circuit from ATI. Previous rumors have said that RV670 will not be a strict die-shrink but will have some changes made to it, and perhaps not even be as fast as the R600. However, since ATI will be using a newer manufacturing process it might be running faster than the R600 to compensate for that, while still being cooler. It at least seems so according to the information posted now.
VR-Zone states that ATI will use a 55nm process for the RV670, this contradicts previous reports that says it will use 65nm. If we understand things correctly 55nm is just an optic shrink of the 65nm process, in the same way as 80nm is of 90nm. Then it seems quite feasible that ATI would be using a 55nm process for its coming graphics chip.
The source states that there will actually be two different RV670 chips, Gladiator and Revival. Gladiator is the faster of the two with a core running at 825MHz and 512MB memory with speeds of 1.2GHz (GDDR4), while Revival will run at 750MHz and have 512 or 256MB GDDR3 memory running at 900MHz.
RV670 seems to have been slightly delayed though as mass production is not estimated to start before December and hit the market at the end of the year at best. Contradictory to previous reports it will in fact be known as Radeon HD 2950 Pro and cost $199-249.
No word on the speculated dual-GPU card, but one suspects that the Revival circuit might be the one intended for that…
